MONTREAL — The man who asks to go by the name Jimmy so his four adult children won’t know he’s homeless is impeccably dressed: grey zip-up Timberland sweater, pressed black pants, leather shoes polished to a sheen. Skin stretched tight over a face a touch too gaunt and the way he fiddles incessantly with his grey fedora are the only indications crack cocaine got its tentacles in two decades ago.

“Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you have to give up,” said the 51-year-old former restaurant manager who’s been eating and sleeping at the Old Brewery Mission downtown for two years. “You can still look after yourself.”

Many winter days are spent at indoor malls, where he recognizes several like himself: destitute but presentable, and thus unseen. They gaze at shoppers overladen with Christmas gifts, and remember what was, or what should have been.

“When this time comes, it’s terrible for me,” he said slowly, the fedora twirling through his fingers. “For most it’s a time to rejoice, but for me there is no rejoicing. I look at all that from different eyes.”

In this time of gifts and family gatherings and too much food, there’s a large segment for whom the holiday season is just another time of need.

“At this time of year, people are going around spending a lot of money on gifts for people they love and care about,” said Matthew Pearce, director general of the Old Brewery Mission. “Juxtaposed with that you have the homeless population, which is a population of people that have mostly lost contact with family and friends and live lives of isolation, and are not facing the kind of holiday season that perhaps many of the rest of us are.”

At the Welcome Hall Mission, they’ve been handing out chicken and turkeys to 600 families a day for two weeks, many of them single-parent immigrant families struggling to find work and raise their children.

“When you have families that are marginalized and barely making ends meet, the joyous times are not so joyous,” said Cyril Morgan, executive director of one of the city’s largest food banks, which distributes food to 4,500 families every month. “They complain about not having food on the table, about having no gifts for the kids.”

A small percentage of Dans la rue’s clientele of street kids will try to go home for the holidays.

“We have to pick up a lot of depressed kids in January when the reality hits that things did not work out,” said Dorothy Massimo, director of development. “Those that had forgotten about when they left and tried to go back to some ideal that doesn’t exist ... in the hopes of finding that family that they are desperately craving.”

Institutions do what they can. The Old Brewery Mission has already started cooking up the 200 turkeys necessary for Christmas meals that will be distributed to 1,000 individuals, along with warm woollen socks and chocolates. Dans la rue will prepare 275 Christmas meals for the teenagers with nowhere else to go, and distribute backpacks filled with necessities and bonuses like chocolates, courtesy of Aldo shoes, which donates a total of 500 backpacks every year.

The Welcome Hall Mission distributed 8,000 toys to 2,400 kids in one day this month. “For a lot of these children, they may be the only toys they get,” Morgan said.

The Mission also distributes cheques from The Gazette Christmas fund, which is trying to raise at least $1 million once again through the generosity of its readers, to be distributed in the form of $125 cheques to at least 8,200 families. The success of the fund is due largely to the fact The Gazette publishes articles for five weeks chronicling the hardships many face.

“The cheques we get from the Christmas Fund go mostly to families, often single-parent immigrants going back to school to learn French so they can work as doctors or lawyers or nurses,” Morgan said. “It’s something to see when they get their cheques — it’s like they won the lottery.”

In addition to food, the mission also provides a valuable bridge between two worlds.

“Volunteers rub shoulders with these people and realize they’re just people who are down on their luck.”

Sylvain Gosselin, 51, has been eating and sleeping at the Old Brewery Mission for 20 years. He is homeless, but not idle (“If I don’t work, I die,”) volunteering to serve dinner at the mission seven days a week, and also at another mission seven hours a day, five days a week. Even with the work, the holidays make him feel like there’s a rock in his stomach.

“I keep my pain inside. I’ll watch a film or listen to music (at the Mission) but then my eyes fill with tears and I have to go away.”

His mother died long ago, his father last year, his four siblings don’t talk to him because they say he does nothing with his life. But he takes pride in his work, and he’s popular among his homeless brethren, whom he knows by face if not by name, for the help he provides.

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